My Life, My Practice: Reflections of a Contemporary Yogi

My Life, My Practice: Reflections of a  Contemporary Yogi

From South Africa to England to India to Los Angeles....

Introduction

I have been teaching yoga since 1994, which is the same year that I first came across Ken Wilber’s work. My exploration of both understanding his evolving model and developing my own ILP has been interwoven with my approach to teaching and my one-on-one bodywork/counseling sessions. But let's begin at the beginning.

I began meditating at age 17, with my post-hippie Mum's assurance that it would help with my exam nerves. The first time I roped a friend into meditating with me before a dreaded Geometry exam we both scored in the 90% range! Unfortunately, this was never replicated, but it may qualify as my first peak experience! I came up with a troubled family background in a fairly tough neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, during the most intense two decades of the Apartheid era. For me the move to California in 1990 was not only a dream come true and a chance to go to the Musician's Institute in Hollywood, but also a skipping out on the refused draft notice into the undeclared civil war against Black South Africans and against neighboring Angola that could have potentially sent me to jail for six years.

During my time at Musician's Institute I picked up a book on yoga by a 70's American TV star of whom I had never heard. I practiced a brief series of excruciatingly difficult (for me) beginner's yoga poses every morning before meditating and practicing my note reading, scales, modes, and arpeggios on my unplugged Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. Little did I know this was the beginning of my Integral Life Practice!  I would go down to a little church off Hollywood Blvd. some Saturdays and sit in the congregation with about 30 people to hear the Course in Miracles service conducted by a beautiful and charismatic - and then unknown, young woman named Marianne Williamson. This is not a religion - she would say - it's a course in spiritual psychotherapy.

The music school was on the same block as the Scientology recruiting office, and this was the same year that TIME magazine published their cover story expose on that church. It was walking distance (for the non-L.A. natives who still walked) from the Psychic Eye bookstore, where I went to see Shakti Gawain speak about her popular book Creative Visualization. But, I don't understand - said the middle-aged woman in the audience - I have been visualizing a yellow Mercedes, why has it not manifested?

My interest in spirituality had already been piqued by the introduction to meditation and some powerful psychedelic experiences prior to leaving South Africa. Now here I was in the middle of the wild and wooly west, where, for better or worse, the post "harmonic convergence" New Age was in full swing. I loved it. I listened to self-hypnosis tapes every night. I got into Tony Robbins and did his 30 Days to Personal Power program, got sober, became more self-aware and spoke with a knowing look about past-lives, vegetarianism, self-created reality and the laws of the universe.  Then I did a Forum-esque training called Lifespring. I bet I was insufferable! Sincere but insufferable...

After MI I spent ayear livng in England with my parents - all the while yearning to return to L.A.

Enlightenment and The Shadow

I went to India at 24 and studied at the Osho (Rajneesh) Ashram for a couple months. Someone put Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness in my hand after I had returned. Shortly thereafter I began teaching yoga. In Spectrum I found the first statement of something I had been trying to make sense of - an integration of Eastern and Western insight into the nature of the human mind. I had become very caught up in the Neo-Adveita scene fronted by folks like Gangaji, Catherine Ingram, Yudishtara and a young Andrew Cohen at the time. I would engage the Yankee satsang leaders (back when there were still only a few) in dialog which attempted to show that I "got it," semantic jousting and jesting on the nature of the Self, who wanted to know and what there was to attain when we were already steeped in the unavoidable non-dual reality - that sort of thing. How wonderful to be so enlightened. Of course, a big fall was coming.

A disastrous failed soul-mate relationship with a similarly enlightened goddess was to show me that something was missing in my conception of spirituality. I would come to realize over the next few years that there was a whole area of my inner being that I had managed to side-step, avoid, deny and repress using the smorgasbord of spiritual ideas and beliefs I had picked up. I got into therapy at 25. The missing piece had to do with my psychological history, my deep emotions, the capacity to be vulnerable, open and responsive to life as-it-is. Ironically, I was still in hiding and much of the enlightened bravado was a superior sham, a way of pretending not to be a real person with a real life, because whose "story" is this anyway, right?

A very difficult period of about three years ensued as I struggled to work through the layers of painful feelings from my past and to get past the spiritual judgments and rationalizations I had taken on as a defense. How to reconcile this psychological work, this humbling emotional rawness with the transcendent and deeply liberating truths I thought I had understood through my spiritual path? My therapy included a lot of Holotropic Breathwork and I started reading Stan Grof, whose transpersonal model includes both spiritual and psychological work.  I kept reading Wilber. Spectrum, No Boundary, The Atman Project, Up from Eden.  My meditation shifted from "Who Am I?" to Vipassana a la Jack Kornfield - learning to "sit with" my experience rather than transcend it. I found Pema Chodron and John Welwood’s books. The emphasis in my teaching started to shift from intense concentration instructions as a way to rise above the distracting chatter of the mind and the negative patterns of the emotions and toward an encouragement to really be present with what is, to feel the body more deeply to allow feelings to emerge and listen to their wisdom.

I got more deeply into studying and practicing both yoga and now bodywork as ways to engage, explore, reveal and heal the mind-body connection. I moved away from metaphysical answers toward an ever-deepening curiosity about the process itself and the questions it raised - and no-one raised more questions, or put the questions in context more elegantly than Ken Wilber - and by now I was reading (and having my mind blown by) A Brief History of Everything and One Taste.

The safety, intimacy, emotional veracity and ecstatic potency of the bodywork my friends and i were developing became another initiatory doorway into powerful altered state experience of raw essence and self-knowledge. Keeping the headiness of Wilberian theory grounded in mind-body process and humbling shadow work has been an important key to both "keeping it real," and to accessing fluid ecstatic states rather than just thinking or reading about them... Further proof for me that an authentic spirituality need concern itself little with belief or faith and can rely instead on a kind of experiential experimental science of inquiry and discovery.

My young man insistence that everything could be cured by meditation or yoga or just dropping the ego was being slowly replaced by not only a full spectrum model that acknowledged that different practices and therapies were appropriate to different issues, but that there was also a series of developmental stages that had to be traversed by every human being AND that all of this could be situated on a four quadrant map of reality that made extraordinary sense. I understood now (for example) that some kinds of meditation would make trauma survivors dissociate from their felt experience even further rather than actually providing an opportunity to heal and integrate. Also,  spiritual experiences were available to all - regardless of their stage of development, but that those experiences would be interpreted in predictable ways depending on that stage of development and the cultural context within which it was occurring. Wow. I understood that the Upper Right empirical perspective on depression was of great importance and that some people really did benefit from medication - that there needn't be a war between Prozac and practice, between medication and meditation.

My critique of the New Age deepened as I worked more on myself and as my Integrally-informed perspective kept expanding. The piece of Wilber theory that helped me make sense of a niggling intuitive sense and that I still fiind most incisive and useful here is his essay The Pre/Trans Fallacy. I realized that in America, the community within which yoga is widely practiced is steeped in the unhealthy Green, regressive, prerational New Age worldview that is very partial and perpetuates a lot of suffering and confusion, whether in the form of outdated transplanted Hindu orthodoxy or in the form of metaphysical spiritual spin that dances as fast as it can to stay away from the hard knocks of psychological, philosophical, societal and political realities. I used Holotropic Breathing Workshops as a way to inroduce people  to deep emotion, shadow-work, energetic experience and the astonishingly real layers of  mind-body transformational work.

AQAL Application

I started to include more music in my classes and got interested in how the space I was creating could serve as an AQAL environment for personal growth experiences to arise. It's a community space (LL) in which we use music, poetry, breath and movement (UR) to stimulate physiological state changes in concurrence with (UL) intentional focus and a willingness to be in process with the relationship between Ego and Self, surface and depth, heart and soul, and lastly all of this is occurring within a (LR) framework created by the yoga studio, my overlapping healing and cleansing business, the yearly schedule of classes, retreats, workshops and fund-raisers.

But more than that, what's most important for me is the UL work that is made possible via the support of the other three quadrants - work that has to do with entering altered states in which insight and healing can arise, work that has to do with the intention to integrate those altered states into permanent traits over time as stage-wise development along kinesthetic, emotional, cognitive, ethical and spiritual lines occurs. To this end I have woven together the elements of music, poetry, breath and movement now to include ecstatic dance and live drummers in some classes and a rap during the classes and in my workshop lectures that forges a 21st century integration of yoga and meditation practices with psychological process and mind-body energetics - all within a framework that owes a lot to Integral Theory.

My eye is always on how to introduce a "three strands of science" approach to all "three modes of knowing" in the practice space - to encourage people to keep developing their cognitive abilities alongside both their embodiment process and the capacity to stay present with all that is arising in a contemplative way. The ongoing question for me is this: how do I keep creating a space in which authentic insight and healing can emerge, in which the safety to feel deeply and turn to face the shadow can combine with permission to trust love, pleasure and beauty? How can I keep creating a space in which the heart is not privileged over the mind, but both are valued as sacred, in which the transcendent is not used as a way out of the immanent but seen as something in interwoven relationship to body, heart and mind. I share a kind of contemporary tantric perspective with people, one that suggests that the sacred or the spiritual is found through a deepening engagement with mind, body and shadow, not through trying to get to somewhere or something else. That the process of ongoing initiation via practice has very little to do with nice-sounding belief and a great deal to do with presence, courage, compassion and honesty.

In 2000 I began teaching a workshop series called Yoga and the Chakras that uses the developmental model from both Integral Theory and the kind of Transpersonalism that it grew out of as well as my own unique understanding of the relationships between anatomy, energy and psychology. I went on to teach this series for the next six years around the country and it turned into my 8 CD product called Radical Transformation: A Map to Mind-Body Ecstasy.

For several years now I have also been teaching my Open Sky Retreats which give people a three-day experience of nature, community and the integration of meditation instruction with my unique approach to yoga and ecstatic dance. We spend the mornings in silence with meditation and yoga and the early evenings in yoga/dance exploration and celebration. My Open Sky bodyworkers offer one-on-one sessions in the afternoons. We make space for the shadow and encourage an open dialog between mind and body. We open a space for awareness of spirit to emerge through and around the unfolding process of what is and we share it in the safe LL of deep listening in community circle.

Integral Theory has helped me to do what I am most interested in doing - to create and share substantive work that addresses multiple dimensions of the human experience and creates a context for stage-wise development, ecstatic experience, and the co-creation of an authentic 21st century spirituality.